General Ledger Accounts

Introduction

A general ledger account is a record used to sort, store, and summarise a company's transactions to produce the income statement, balance sheet, and other financial reports. Often this is an aged and rigid system that has been in place for many years and is far too complex to unwind or to transfer opening balances and transactions into a new, clean company.

Typical Problems

Rigid structure and difficult-to-manage accounts are often inherited from a previous financial controller making any required changes such as new GL codes, accounting standards, or expense types difficult to implement.

Reporting can be difficult due to the rigidity of General Ledger/Chart of Accounts. This can make creating crucial management reports more complicated than needs to be.

The lack of statistical accounts means that all statistical information must be recorded as a separate report or completely out of the system which creates a big disconnect.

Solutions

Using a modern cloud-based accounting suite offers greater flexibility and makes it easier to maintain account journals and financial reports regardless of new legal and operational requirements.

Old Codes and Charts of accounts can be restructured with ease, allowing room for growth for codes and making it easier to restructure if it does reach a limit.

Statistical accounts allow you to record your KPIs and include them with GL values, to give you a more comprehensive reporting experience.

Benefits/ROI

With an easier-to-manage GL List and Chart of Accounts, it allows for changes across your business and means that you can restructure with ease.

A single report detailing GL values but also statistical information. This can be combined onto a Dashboard too, to pull even more information, giving you dimensional depth to reports too.

You can then schedule the report and dashboard to be sent to you, so you can see the information required, automating a previously manual process.